cleaning up the mess
i recently did one of those on-line personality assessments. i find them pretty accurate if you are half-way honest about who you are. here is one of the descriptions of me:
“you feel that a clean, orderly desk is the sign of a person that doesn’t have enough to do. you don’t need everything in its place; it is not empowering to you to feel that the world around you is neat and organized…”
i think these folks took a picture of my desk before they wrote that part of the report. 
what leads me down this path is that i decided to get rid of some stuff that has cluttered the top of my desk for some time. in the midst of cleaning off the desk i found some interesting stuff. stuff i didn’t even know i had or was supposed to have.
one of the sets of papers on my desk was a series of quarterly reports to the irs. i think they were income statements, pay period reports or something of the sort. being that i don’t even attempt to do my own taxes i didn’t understand the reports anyway. i took them immediately to our finance folks. i have no idea how they got on my desk. they were useless to me.
second was a series of papers dated 1997 that were the original organizational statements for WRC. Listed the staff, sponsor churches, how much money each had raised for salaries, vision, values, evangelism plans, schedule of events. it was pretty interesting but basically useless to me. again i have no idea how they got on my desk. i have enough “junk” on my desk without having someone elses “stuff.”
except for the quarterly reports which i returned to finance 99.9% of this “stuff” got thrown away. i think i probably need to go through my computer files and do the same type of clean-up. but then i needed a document from a couple of years ago from someone and they were able to go back 2 years and have a record of just what i needed. so you never know.
there is a point to this…there is enough clutter in our lives, clean it out once in a while, get rid of the old “stuff” and make room for new “stuff”. it is the same way for our emotions. what “stuff” is taking up space on your emotional data bases that are holding you back? clean it out and clean it up. 1 john 1: 9 confess it, get rid of it, move on.
you can see the top of my cabinet for the first time in some time. i need to make sure i’m not littering my emotional and spiritual life with junk. need to clean that up too. hope i remember that lesson more often.
